Trafficking victims must get counselling to pursue justice, say stakeholders
by Christopher Thomas/Gleaner Writer · The GleanerWESTERN BUREAU:
Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Malike Kellier, and Audrey Budai, the coordinator for the National Task Force Against Trafficking in Persons, say the victims of human trafficking who do not get counselling may be resistant to seeking justice through the courts.
According to Kellier, who along with Budai participated in Tuesday’s Human Rights Day 2024 Expo at the Harmony Beach Park in Montego Bay, St James, victims of human trafficking may be turned off from testifying because, without counselling, they may see court proceedings as an extension of the trauma they have already faced.
“The main challenge that we have as prosecutors, I would say, is the [un]willingness of the victim to give the evidence, and so victim care or witness care is very, very critical. There is dialogue that we hold with the clerks of the court, and we say to them from the get-go, that they must establish that relationship with their witness, because the witness, first and foremost, is a victim, and these are persons who have either physical, mental, or emotional trauma,” said Kellier.
“We all know that trauma affects each person differently, so for them to now open up in the context of a criminal trial, and to give this evidence, that is a challenge that we are still very much battling with. Sometimes through the inter-agency dialogue we have, by the time the matter reaches to the prosecutor in court, the victim is so far turned off or has not been counselled enough to put them in a place of readiness to give the evidence,” continued Kellier. “From our standpoint, what we have been doing is flagging the types of matters with the relevant persons from the parish court level, so that when it reaches to us, we already have a relationship with the victim.”
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Budai, in outlining her position in the panel discussion staged under the theme ‘Our Rights, Our Future, Right Now’, recounted an incident where a human trafficking victim was shamed at school, as an example of why such individuals must receive psychosocial assistance to reintegrate into normal society.
“One obstacle is the discrimination, the shame, that we put to our people. Even recently, a young lady came in to see us and all protocols were observed, and yet still, when she went to school on Monday morning, during the devotion it was the topic from the platform, so therefore she ran away,” said Budai.
“If you do not have victim care, if you do not hold their hand, if you do not deal with the psychological, the psychosocial, the community help and all of that, you can lose them. We have lost a lot of persons [victims] because they cannot bother and they turn back because they feel ashamed,” continued Budai.
“Sometimes because of what is happening in the court, there are so many matters before the court, so the process takes a very, very long time, and then they get frustrated, and they do not want to bother. You have to take them through, you have to protect them, you have to find jobs to get them reintegrated, and some of them, sadly, return to a life of misery,” she added.
In December 2023, The University of the West Indies and the Consular Corps of Jamaica signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to aid in training and building various stakeholder groups’ awareness on human trafficking. That signing ceremony followed the 2018 signing of the Child Protection Compact Partnership MOU between the United States and Jamaica, where it was revealed that children represented a significant number of the roughly 2.5 million people subjected to human trafficking annually.
During Tuesday’s forum, it was revealed that there are currently up to 45 human trafficking matters that are currently being processed through the court system, with some having been recorded from different sittings of the Circuit Court across Jamaica since January this year.